Sean Doolittle is a crime, suspense, and horror novelist and the author of seven books: Dirt (UglyTown, 2001), Burn (UglyTown, Bantam Dell, 2003), Rain Dogs (Bantam Dell, 2005), The Cleanup (Bantam Dell, 2006), Safer (Bantam Dell, 2009), Lake Country (Bantam Dell, 2012), and most recently Kill Monster (Audible Originals, Severn House, 2019). Originally from southeast Nebraska, his books have won the ITW Thriller Award, the Barry Award, and many others. He’s also worked full-time throughout his writing career.
I first met Sean in 2014 when he taught a graduate-level fiction writing workshop at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he gave me some instrumental feedback on my first novel and wasn’t afraid to make pop-culture references in class. We kept in touch, and earlier this year sat down over Zoom to talk about getting his work out there, his mid-career slump, and finding time to write when you have a day job.
I. I Had No Idea How People Became Writers
But I Also Have a Day Job: When did you first realize you wanted to write—either as a hobby, or more than a hobby?
Sean Doolittle: I think it really started toward the end of my high school years, right before college. My focus had been music, and I had a pretty decent music scholarship to UNL [University of Nebraska-Lincoln].
BIAHADJ: What kind of music?
SD: I grew up playing piano, and then in high school I played the saxophone, and I was good enough to have gotten a saxophone scholarship. My scholarship was in the classical track, but I was interested in more jazz-type stuff even though I had no background in that at all. My mother was overjoyed that this saxophone she’d saved her pennies to buy me was going to help pay for my college.
BIAHADJ: Was writing something you discovered separately?
SD: I had an English teacher who would read to us on Fridays, and he read some stuff that really lit me up and made me want to try writing short stories myself. I started dabbling around with writing in high school with him and another guy from my community as mentors. By the summer before I was supposed to go to college, on a senior field trip to the Lincoln Public Library I checked out a copy of—are you old enough to remember the Writer’s Market?
BIAHADJ: [laughs] I’m not that young!
SD: So I checked out the Writer’s Market from the library and spent the next week just poring over every single page, thinking, Oh, this is how you do it, you just look up these places and mail stuff to them! [laughs]
BIAHADJ: And before you found the Writer’s Market you had no idea how that worked?
SD: No, I had no idea how people became writers. It just seemed impossible. But when I saw a documented way to approach it, I thought, wow. Then as a senior in high school I started actually sending my stories to places and collecting rejection letters—the stuff was not publishable in any way, but it gave me a taste of that process of writing a story, revising it, getting it into the best shape I could, putting it into an envelope, putting stamps on it with a self-addressed return envelope, and sending it out, then waiting by the mailbox for something to come back, indicating that yes, this process actually works, like, somebody got this, they read it, and then rejected it. That was exhilarating. [laughs]
BIAHADJ: How about when you got to college?
SD: I went to UNL knowing I wanted to be a writer but still not knowing how you made a living doing that. So I enrolled in the journalism college thinking I would study journalism, keep writing short stories, and try to hopefully publish one sometime.
BIAHADJ: And was music off your radar at that point?
SD: Yeah, I said, Mom, Dad, I’m not taking this scholarship, I’m going to go be a writer—and my sweet, midwestern country parents, they’re so great, so supportive, but obviously they had misgivings. You’re telling me you’re not going to take that money to go to school? [laughs] They didn’t say that, but I know that must have been what they were thinking. To their credit they said, OK, well, you got to do what you want to do.
BIAHADJ: That’s really good that your parents were supportive—it means a lot.
SD: It does. It means, if nothing else, having the mental freedom to pursue something that you’re really interested in without the crushing guilt of unsupportive parents. I know not everybody has supportive parents, and there are lots of parents out there who if you tell them you want to be a writer that’s like saying you want to join the circus or something.
BIAHADJ: At that point were you aware of the other anxieties that come with the writing life?
SD: Not then, no. I enrolled in journalism at UNL, and my first or second semester I had my first journalism class, and I had enrolled in a fiction-writing workshop that same semester. Taking those two classes side by side taught me [pause] clearly [pause] that I didn’t want to report stuff, I wanted to make up stories.
BIAHADJ: What about the journalism class made you realize that?
SD: It wasn’t All the President’s Men—it didn’t seem sexy at all. It seemed like a real grind. Not that a job has to be exciting or sexy, but it wasn’t what I had been led to believe from watching movies about reporters. It’s hard, meticulous, structured, important work that I was not ready for.
BIAHADJ: Yes, there’s a formula to journalism where stories have to be structured a certain way.
SD: I had enrolled in Gerald Shapiro’s fiction writing 101 or whatever it was called, and literally the first day I tugged on his sleeve and said, This seems awesome, how do you do this? [laughs] And he said, if you’re enthusiastic and interested then you’ve got the first thing you need. And then we turned in our first set of stories and he was so encouraging in his feedback. I’ve had people tell me that I wrote really extra-long letters when teaching writing workshop, when they weren’t accustomed to getting such long letters back. I don’t know if that was your experience or not…
BIAHADJ: I actually appreciate thorough feedback—knowing that the person took the time and was willing to respond.
SD: It meant a lot to me too, and I got that from Gerry Shapiro. That first letter he wrote back to me on that short story was so encouraging and so insightful, and I still have it in my file cabinet. At the very end of it he said, I don’t say this often, and I don’t say this lightly, but you have the raw materials to become a writer, if that’s what you really want. That was it—I was in it for life then. [laughs] And I’ve come to believe that you have to be in it for life, because it’s too hard otherwise.
BIAHADJ: Going back to journalism, what was it like when you decided to sever that relationship and focus on English?
SD: It was easy for me—I think literally after one or two weeks of having both of those classes I walked straight to the administration building and changed my major from journalism to English and dropped that journalism class. From then on I devoted myself to being an English major and writing as many stories as I could between doing my schoolwork, then once again found myself confronting the question: How do you make a living at this?
BIAHADJ: Did that happen when you were in school, or after graduation?
SD: In school. I didn’t know what you did with an English degree, really, so for a long time I just set myself on the track of pursuing a terminal degree and then maybe getting a teaching job at a college somewhere and writing on my own time. That was my plan, so I decided to go to grad school and just stayed at UNL and continued in the English department there.
II. “Never Tell Me the Odds”
BIAHADJ: What was the transition like going from undergraduate straight to grad school?
SD: It was a rude awakening. Not because it was a hostile environment or anything—although to some degree I had a sense of not fitting 100% in the program. Back then I was writing horror stories and genre stuff, and that didn’t quite fit well with academic university writing. But more than that, the academics were so much more rigorous in grad school than they had been in undergrad. I was a fairly successful undergraduate student—I got good grades and graduated with distinction and all that stuff, and I expected more of the same going into grad school, but when I got there I realized I almost wasn’t even prepared for it, and I thought I was a good student. [laughs]
So by the time I finished my master’s degree I’d come to the decision that maybe I wasn’t cut out to be an academic. I loved the college environment, and when I was back on campus for your workshop I loved every minute of that—but also, fiction writer jobs are kind of thin on the ground, or at least they were then, and everybody in an MFA program wants one.
BIAHADJ: Yep…
SD: So you have to find a niche somewhere in academics, but I didn’t want to find the gaps in early American literature and make that my lifetime of study.
BIAHADJ: Did you even attempt to do that, or did you know right away that wasn’t something you wanted to do?
SD: I took a shot when I first graduated with my MA—I was still only 23 or 24 at that point. I knew the odds were long, but I took a few stabs at sending CVs out to smaller schools and community colleges hoping maybe I could put a master’s degree with some short story publications and find some sort of a teaching job, but it was a tough sled. I don’t think I had any serious consideration anywhere, so at that point it was just a matter of looking for some kind of regular job.
BIAHADJ: What did you end up finding?
SD: Lincoln had—still has—a magazine publisher that publishes a slate of very specialized material—like, they had some magazines about farm equipment. [laughs] It was a good first job because they were pretty good at plucking people exactly like me out of the English department and molding them however they wanted, so I kind of lucked my way into a job there. I worked there for a couple of years—they had some computer technology-related magazines, and I wrote for one of those for a couple of years, really longform magazine journalism. So ironically I ended up being sort of a journalist.
BIAHADJ: Were you living on your own then, or with your parents?
SD: My wife and I got married right around that time, so we were a very young married couple living in an apartment in Lincoln. I wrote my butt off and just worked, and Jessica finished up her undergrad degree while I finished my master’s, and we just got an apartment and then got jobs, it was all great. This would have been in the mid-90s, and I was still writing short stories all through that time, and I had started to go to industry conferences—not like MLA, but more genre-related conferences where there would be writers and also agents and other industry-type people there.
BIAHADJ: Were these conferences local, or were you traveling a long way to get there?
SD: I was going to different cities. When I first started these would have been things like the World Fantasy Convention and the World Horror Convention. Unlike Comic-Con and some of those other fan-based conventions, these conventions were for writers and industry people. So I first started to meet other writers from different parts of the country beyond the writers I’d known in grad school, and meeting people who worked in the business and developing my first sense of a writing community. And gradually I sold more short stories to small-press magazines and got into a couple anthologies published by bigger publishers, and I had enough positive feedback to keep me on the track—to let me know that I was making some progress and it wasn’t just a fool’s errand. Then I got to a point when I was ready to tackle a novel, and I did and it was terrible.
BIAHADJ: I definitely want to hear about that! What made you think you were ready to tackle a novel, and how did you realize it was terrible?
SD: Just blind delusion, really. Other people were writing novels, so I thought I should write a novel. There’s something great about that early phase where you’re just a bundle of enthusiasm and you really don’t know how long your odds are or how hard it is, so you just do it. [laughs] It’s a sort of act of willful self-delusion—like Han Solo said in Star Wars, “Never tell me the odds.”
BIAHADJ: [laughs] Yep.
SD: But of course it’s not impossible, it’s entirely possible—you just have to stay with it long enough and keep making your own luck and keep driving to get better. But I’d realized by that point that this was going to be my life and I was just going to work a normal-person job and keep writing, and keep climbing in publication status, for lack of a better word, and maybe get into novels. I’ve always had the vague hope that one day I would be able to write fiction for a living. Short of that I had the safety net of being able to pay my bills because of the day job. My wife was working in Omaha and commuting [about an hour] from Lincoln and she was getting tired of it, so I found a job up there. It was a job I didn’t particularly like, but I did it almost twenty years.
BIAHADJ: What kind of job was it?
SD: Technical writing—like user manuals. It wasn’t something I particularly enjoyed, but it was something I had a facility to do, it wasn’t that hard, and it was a steady paycheck. What always fulfilled me was my fiction writing that I was doing on the side.
BIAHADJ: Which at that point was working on novels?
SD: I’d written two full novel manuscripts—and with the first one, you asked me how I knew it was bad. Well, I didn’t—I thought it was awesome. I thought it was the best thing anybody had ever written. But sending it out to publishers and getting no traction and judging their responses and putting them all together and piecing some kind of consensus about what was working and what wasn’t working—you know how it is. So I took everything I’d learned with that first manuscript and wrote another one, and suddenly I started the see the problems with that first manuscript.
BIAHADJ: Were you working completely on your own, or did you have guidance from other writers?
SD: From traveling to conventions and meeting other writers you develop a sort of network of people you can send stuff to, and you read each other’s stuff. There was a writer around that time in the mid-‘90s named Brian Hodge, and I loved his books. I met him at a convention, and we hit it off just as people and became friends. I begged him to read my first book, and he graciously did. He was a real, working, publishing pro—he had a couple of books out on Dell Publishing, which was a big publisher. He gave me some encouraging but also very straight commentary on my manuscript, and I’ll be honest—it really stung that he didn’t just love my book as much as I thought he should. But it was so helpful and instructive, and formative, really. His commentary on that manuscript really shaped me in a lot of different ways. It allowed me to take some lessons into the second book, which also didn’t find a publisher—but it did find an agent.
BIAHADJ: That must have been exciting. I think a lot of writers see getting an agent as a significant achievement—a kind of artificial sign that they’ve made it.
SD: I was all excited—this was a real New York city literary agent, you know? Like I’d seen back in Writers Market in high school [laughs] so I thought this was on the verge of happening. This was around the time I was taking that Omaha job, and in some ways I was thinking I would take the job even though it wasn’t really what I wanted to do, but my agent was getting ready to send the book out so I thought it wasn’t going to be for long. So that was kind of a double blow—not only did the book not sell, I’m also a tech writer.
BIAHADJ: What happened when the agent tried to sell it?
SD: I think different agents do it in different ways, but in this case she sent it out, and it was out for a period of weeks, and then one day I got a big fat envelope in the mail stuffed with all twelve rejection letters, and her note said Well Sean, Here’s the response to the first round, look it over, see what you can gather from it. I don’t think she went out again, I think she said we were going to stop there. So I did that, and by the time I’d finished my next book she’d left agenting altogether and moved to work in television, so I got passed to a different agent at that agency. And that agent read Dirt, my third manuscript, and was like, Eh, I don’t think so. [laughs] So then I had no agent, and I was a tech writer, and it felt like I was back at square one. So I did what you just did with your book—I started searching out small presses on my own and sending it out, getting rejected even by small presses—it was like my wheels were spinning and I couldn’t get any traction.
BIAHADJ: How did you eventually get Dirt picked up?
SD: It’s like they say, you only need one, and eventually I came across a press that was just getting started, and they were looking for writers. It’s hard for a brand-new press to find good material, and I think they thought my book was a cut above what they’d been seeing. It was no money, at the time a no-name press, UglyTown, but they were going to publish it. And they were go-getters, young like me and enthusiastic, trying to make waves and get their name out there. They went to all these conventions too and worked the crowd, and it was a great small press to be on as a first-time novelist.
III. It Felt Kind of Outlaw and Cool
BIAHADJ: Were you going to conventions with UglyTown to promote Dirt, or were they doing the promoting for you?
SD: By this time I’d shifted over from horror into the crime thriller/suspense genre, and there’s a big annual conference called Bouchercon, which is named after an old critic, Anthony Boucher, from the mystery world. In the writing world it’s a pretty large convention—four or five thousand people go, and all the major publishers go, lots of agents go, there’s a good industry presence there. So they [the UglyTown publishers] would go, I would go, and we’d just kind of meet up there. It felt kind of outlaw and cool—it felt fun, you know? Even though we weren’t getting a lot of attention—getting a review was like pulling teeth. [laughs]
BIAHADJ: This was in 2001, which seems like an interesting era because the internet was starting to gain traction but so much was still offline. Were you doing things the old-fashioned way, or were you using the internet?
SD: The old-fashioned way mostly. We used the internet to the extent that UglyTown had a website, and they really tried to develop their brand through their website with a kind of a hip energy. But at that time online markets were just starting to trickle out. There weren’t that many of them and it was still a lot of small, print-based magazines and stuff. Getting your book out there was a matter of sending hard copies places, schlepping boxes of books around, shoving them into people’s hands at conventions, things like that.
I think with all that work we ended up with one little blurb in Publisher’s Weekly about the book, and it wasn’t even really a review, it was mostly an announcement. But the person who wrote it used an adjective in the paragraph, and they used the adjective “uproarious” when they said “Sean Doolittle’s uproarious first novel,” and suddenly we had a word: “Uproarious, Publisher’s Weekly” [laughs]
BIAHADJ: Did that go on the inside cover?
SD: Not on that book, but on the next book, Burn. And then also, in a complete surprise, really because of all the sort of shoe leather hustling these two guys did—Amazon was still pretty young back then, certainly not the juggernaut that it is now, but even back in 2001 they had started doing a Best of the Year list and there were like a hundred books on it. One of the guys at Amazon that they shoved the book in front of put Dirt on his list, so suddenly we had two things we could use for the next book, and then the next book got more attention because of those two things, and it slowly started to build.
BIAHADJ: Did things change after you built up that energy?
SD: There was no money in those first two books—none. Through this I was still working my day job and paying my bills that way. But, still being relatively young—I wasn’t a kid, but I was still 30 or 31—these successes, albeit minor, were enough to keep me buoyed to keep grinding away at my day job and keep writing books. If you’re working a job that your heart’s not really in, it really helps to have a little positive feedback from this other thing you’re doing.
BIAHADJ: When did you do most of your writing?
SD: For years my method was to write very late at night. I’d been a night owl since I was a kid, and when Dirt came out, that same spring my wife and I had our first child. It was an exciting time for us, but now I was a young guy with a day job and a kid, and I didn’t want to be an absent husband or an absent father, so I would do my day job, then I’d spend time with my wife and baby through the evening, then after they went to bed at ten or ten-thirty I would go upstairs and saddle up and write until two in the morning or whatever. And I did that for years.
BIAHADJ: And then get up and go to work the next morning?
SD: Yeah, I don’t think I ever got more than four or five hours of sleep all those years. But again, that relative youth energy can really push you. I can’t do that now [laughs] but the thrill of minor success is enough to give some validation to the effort, and kind of kept me going. In fact, I’d just finished the short story that eventually became The Cleanup at like one in the morning, went to bed exhausted, and as soon as I lay down my wife sat up and said, “I think my water just broke.” [laughs] I didn’t even go to bed, I just got up and went to the hospital.
IV. Hype Really Takes You a Long Way
BIAHADJ: Had your goals changed at all when you were publishing those early books?
SD: Throughout those years it seemed like the plan was working: I started on UglyTown, then I did my second book on UglyTown, but then Bantam Dell picked up the paperback rights so I was with Bantam Dell, and then I was really kind of where I wanted to be. I had in my sights that dream of maybe doing this for a living because I was with a pretty big publisher that paid regular money, though not enough money to live on.
BIAHADJ: What was the transition like moving from UglyTown to Bantam Dell?
SD: With Burn, as I mentioned, we built on what little we had from the first book. The publishers really smartly decided to launch the publication of Burn at Bouchercon, and then they did another smart thing—back in those days there wasn’t social media, but people were still on newsgroups and message boards. There was a mystery readers message board, and the guys sent the book to some of the more prominent voices on that message board, and it started getting a little chatter. A lot of the people from that message board were also Bouchercon attendees, so we had this sweet little moment of chatter happening at the convention, about my book. Enough people were talking about it that publishers started to kind of hear it—what’s this book, who’s this guy?
By the time I got back from Bouchercon I had a couple of publishers actually emailing me and asking me if the paperback rights to Burn were still available, and nobody had even read it yet. You learn that in the Big 5 publishing world hype really takes you a long way—even a little bit of hype. By hype standards it was tiny, but it was enough to catch the attention of a couple of editors. I still had no agent, but there was one agent, David Hale Smith I had met a couple of times at these conferences. I’d queried him and he’d rejected me, and he didn’t really have much interest, but I liked him and I liked who he was representing, so I kept him on my radar. When I had a couple of emails from editors in my hands I just picked up the phone and called him and said, “Hey, you probably don’t remember me, but we met at Bouchercon. I’ve got these editors asking about my book, do you want to handle this? And he was like, Yeah.
BIAHADJ: Wow—so you called an agent on the phone, which every agent website out there says to never do under any circumstances. Was it different back then?
SD: I don’t know if it was different everywhere, but it was kind of outsider stuff—David was an up-and-coming agent who represented some good people, but he wasn’t based in New York, he was based in Dallas, fifteen hundred miles from New York, and he was still making his name with the New York establishment. So he was more inclined to be open to a random call from a nobody who had some interest from New York publishers—it was a win for both of us, I think. Through these years I’d been trying to get agents, and once David and I hooked up I just held on for dear life—I didn’t ever want to go through an agent search again.
BIAHADJ: As you know, it’s brutal…
SD: Yeah, and as hard as it was then, it’s harder now. It went on like this through the next four or five books, right up until Lake Country, but at some point that kind of hit a wall and the wheels fell off the cart a little bit.
V. Add Some Arrows to My Quiver
BIAHADJ: What happened when you hit a wall?
SD: I was with Bantam Dell for a total of five books, and at that level with those kind of publishers, your sales level is pretty important. It’s a business, and they’re there to make money, so poor sales really work against you, even though my books were getting what I guess you’d call critical attention, and even a couple of awards here and there. I was a critically respected writer, but I was not selling at all. After a couple of books with them I wrote a book called Safer that was a little bit bigger and a little more mainstream friendly, or so we all thought.
BIAHADJ: Did you write it with that goal in mind, or was Safer the book you wanted to write that just happened to be more mainstream?
SD: The second thing. It was a book that I decided to write that just happened to be more mainstream. I didn’t know the publisher was going to see it as more mainstream. To my joy, they did, so they decided to really put a bit more muscle behind it and try to push it. My other books just came out as paperback originals—there wasn’t a lot of promotion, and the good things that happened to those books kind of happened by luck, happenstance, or whatever, enough to keep the publisher interested. Even though they weren’t selling, there was still enough evidence that I was on my way somewhere. Then I delivered Safer, and they thought [snaps fingers] OK, he just did it, this is the one! So they pushed it a little harder, and all the things you want to happen started happening, like getting reviewed in bigger places, big national magazines like People magazine and places like that. It really looked awesome for a minute, but then the book was published and it just tanked.
BIAHADJ: Augh!
SD: Nobody could believe it. It was a tough time—right during the financial meltdown, 2009. Maybe that was part of it, maybe not; it’s such a mystery why books sell or don’t sell. Maybe people just didn’t respond to it the way we thought they were going to. That was where the wheels fell off—when that book tanked, then they were like, all right, enough Sean Doolittle.
BIAHADJ: What happens to authors in that situation?
SD: To their credit they didn’t just drop me—that happens to authors all the time, when their book fails they just get dropped and their contracts get cancelled. Fortunately there was one more book on that contract and they stuck with me long enough to at least publish it—they didn’t promote it at all or put any real resources behind it, but they still published it. But that was the end—my contract was over.
BIAHADJ: I can only imagine how devastating that must have been.
SD: When I met you guys [in 2014] I was at a low point about my own mental state in terms of my writing career. It had been two years since I’d published a book, I had nothing going, I was burnt out, and the business had kind of crushed my spirit. I had some movie interest in one of my books, The Cleanup, right around that time, so I was throwing all my energy into that, and all my validation was coming from the idea that we could get this movie made. But I wasn’t writing—I wasn’t working on a novel. I had an opportunity to work on the screenplay for The Cleanup and I really enjoyed it. Writing felt fun again for the first time in a while, and I just pursued screenplays for a few years, again, while still working the day job.
BIAHADJ: Were the screenplays original, or adaptations?
SD: The first thing I worked on was a rewrite of the script that already existed for The Cleanup. I really liked it—I’d never written a screenplay before, so I adapted Lake Country on my own, just as a practice. And then I wrote a couple of original things—I actually got paid for one of them, but it didn’t go anywhere.
BIAHADJ: Did you find yourself gravitating more toward screenplays because that’s where your energy naturally wanted to go, or because that’s where you thought your career was going to go?
SD: At first it felt like the first thing. Lake Country really was a terrible experience for me. That book ended up winning a very nice award that made me feel warm and fuzzy two years later, but writing it sucked and finishing it only meant that my contract was done, so at that point I was just empty. I didn’t have any ideas, my energy was low, I just felt frustrated—so when this opportunity to work on The Cleanup script came around, it was fun. It was such a joyful writing experience because it was new and I was learning a whole new skillset. All those things engaged me, so it felt like that was where my energy naturally wanted to go—I didn’t want to write a novel, but I was really having fun doing screenplays. And part of that, of course, was the idea that if this movie goes, I could have a career doing this. Not instead of books—I always knew I would come back to books eventually, but I thought if I could add some arrows to my quiver, let’s do it. So I did that for a while, and then The Cleanup movie didn’t happen either.
BIAHADJ: I can understand that—the idea of placing your hope on work you enjoy that might also be more lucrative.
SD: At that point I’d been at my day job for many years—I think fifteen or sixteen years, and circumstances at that job had changed, with turnover in personnel and management that had made it a much less pleasant place to work. Before I didn’t really like the work, but the environment was fine—it didn’t take much out of me and it allowed me to pursue my private writing. But now suddenly it was a job I didn’t like, the work environment sucked, and it took a lot out of me. Teaching that fiction writing workshop with you guys was kind of a shot in the arm because it really reminded me what I loved about fiction writing. I was not at the top of the world about my own career at that time, so the combination of the film stuff and you guys in that class kind of gave me enough to keep going through that really tough middle part of the 2010s. I also ghostwrote a book for some other people during that time.
BIAHADJ: What was that experience like?
SD: It ended up being really educational, but it was really just filler work—just a way for me to keep working. I didn’t know what I wanted to do for myself, but I wanted to be working. I wasn’t ready—and still am not ready—to give up this life that I’ve devoted my entire adult self to.
VI. Screw It, I’m Just Going to Write This Book
BIAHADJ: Did you find yourself with other ideas you wanted to pursue during this low point, or were you creatively in a dry spell as well?
SD: I had the idea for Kill Monster at that time, but it seemed like such a dumb career move to write that book—I knew it would be hard to sell, and from the word Go I knew it was exactly the wrong kind of book to try to write as a comeback. I was trying to get back with a publisher after being dropped and then not publishing a book for years, so to come out with a kind of in-between hard-to-classify sort of weird novel that didn’t fit with my former track record as a suspense writer, thriller writer, crime writer, whatever you want to call it, just seemed like a bad bet. So I had this idea but didn’t write it because it felt like something I shouldn’t do from a business perspective, but creatively it was the only thing I was excited about.
BIAHADJ: I love how you highlight the difference between getting excited about an idea and then making decisions based on industry standards of what will and won’t sell. I think that’s something a lot of creative people have trouble sorting out when they’re planning their careers.
SD: I don’t think I’m even capable of writing an entire novel about an idea that I’m not personally excited about—I just can’t do it. My goal is always to find that idea that excites me but also seems commercially viable. For me that’s a tough mix—I discard a lot of ideas I’d like to write but that I just don’t think have a shot in this very tough, very crowded market. My goal is to publish at that level I’m describing—that Big 5, larger publishing model. So I thought, I should do something that actually has a chance of getting me back in the game—but I couldn’t come up with anything. I just didn’t have anything that excited me. Then there’s Kill Monster still hanging around, so I finally said, screw it, I’m just going to write this book.
BIAHADJ: How did it feel to be working on a novel again?
SD: I loved writing it—I had fun the whole time. For that reason, if nothing else, it was a really valuable experience—I needed to find my way back to just writing because I love it, and I think Kill Monster really brought me back to writing novels again. So I wrote it, then went through that whole frustrating, demoralizing process of trying to sell it and getting rejected. My previous work really did not help that much in selling it all those years later.
BIAHADJ: Is that just because Kill Monster was different, or because it had been so long?
SD: I think a combination of factors—a long time had passed, and I was still sort of laboring with a poor sales track record. It’s really really really hard to sell your first book and become a debut novelist, but I think what doesn’t get talked about as much is when you’re in the middle of your career and you’ve got a poor sales track, then suddenly you have baggage you never had as a debut author. When you’re a debut author you’re all potential, but when you’ve proven you don’t sell, you have to convince people through the sheer undeniability of the work that they want to publish it. I think bigger publishers just couldn’t figure out what to do with Kill Monster—they didn’t know who the audience would be, they didn’t know how to market it—and some of them just didn’t like it. So then David, my agent, sort of heroically pieced something together—we sold the audio rights first, actually.
BIAHADJ: The novel was an Audible Original first, so how did that happen?
SD: Well, Audible was the only taker. We had a first round of submissions to all the Big 5-type publishers and they all rejected it. Even my former editor at Bantam Dell, who’d gone to a new publisher, said, I love Sean’s writing, and I love this, but I just don’t know who the audience is—I can’t take a chance on this. But Audible Originals was hungrier, they were looking for material, they were trying to establish themselves as a go-to place for writers to send work, and they offered me a contract. Again, not the way I envisioned it playing out necessarily, but I thought, maybe one of these algorithm-driven digital places will be the thing.
BIAHADJ: So the print version came later?
SD: Audible was a great experience, and my editor there was really smart and great to work with, but signing with Audible made it doubly hard to sell the print rights to that book. Audio’s pretty big and publishers don’t want to give up audio rights, so if you come to them with a book and then say, Oh, by the way, audio rights aren’t available, that’s an immediate No from large places. So it was kind of like those old UglyTown days when you just needed one person to say yes. My agent found this terrific publisher in England called Severn House that he met at Bouchercon and they said to send them something, so he sent them Kill Monster and they put out the print book. It didn’t make much of a splash in the world, but it was a wonderful creative experience and it got me fired up about writing books again.
VII. It Was the Work Itself Drawing Me Back to the Chair Every Day
BIAHADJ: What’s been your biggest challenge recently?
SD: Last year in 2020 I got an idea in January that really excited me for a book called Device-Free Weekend, and in April I started writing it. By now, however, years have passed—I’ll be 50 in July, so that stay up until 2 in the morning writing books energy has been gone for a long time. That was another complicating factor during those years between 2012 and 2019. Suddenly writing became hard to do it at all—my kids were older, they were involved in lots of activities, and there were family and other events to go to, so by 10:30 at night I’m shelled—I can’t write fiction until all hours of the morning anymore.
BIAHADJ: I’m the same way—I can’t function if I can’t get a decent night’s sleep.
SD: I heard another writer talk about burnout once, and he likened it to trying to start a car without any gas. To me that’s what it feels like. As I get older I’ve become more and more conscious of energy management and energy conservation. I think you can look at all the demands on your time and the demands on your life as a drain on your writing battery, and often it is a drain on your writing battery, but I think you can also find yourself in places where those things can fill your tank back up—you can convert that energy into a positive instead of a negative. Some people set hobbies aside—I think for a while writing was the thing I set aside. I learned to play the guitar, I focused on my kids. I never abandoned writing, but I had some serious tank-filling to do. I’m not the first person to say this, but to have something to write about you have to live a life—you can’t just write, or at least I can’t.
So for a long time I was really struggling to figure out how to do it—how to have the day job, have the family. It was a struggle not just to find the time, but to apply myself the way I used to. So I kind of got that mojo back with Kill Monster, got in the rhythm of producing daily words again. It might have been writing in my pickup truck at work over lunch or something, but I found ways to get those words in.
BIAHADJ: I think a lot of writers write sporadically like that, especially when they can’t keep a set schedule.
SD: Well, by April, you know what happened—we were in the middle of a pandemic, so my office was shut down and I was working from home. When I first started writing this new manuscript, suddenly my writing space at home was also my day job space. That presented its own new challenge, because I’d work all day at my day job and the last thing I wanted to do was keep sitting in that same chair in the same room in the evening. So when I started Device-Free Weekend I was very frustrated. I felt like I had no time, and the time I did have was time I was not effective to write fiction, so it became very clear to me in 2020 that I had to figure out a new system. [laughs]
BIAHADJ: What did you end up doing?
SD: I’ve never been a morning person, and I’ve tried different times over the years to get up really early and write before work when I’m really fresh in the morning, but I never could do it. But when the pandemic forced everybody into their houses for months on end, there was no choice, I had to figure out something. Somewhere deep down I found the will to start setting my alarm—I started at six in the morning and then I cheated it back to five forty-five, and then pretty soon I was waking up at quarter to five in the morning. I had this little ritual of making a pot of coffee, pouring a glass a water, looking out the window at the dark for a few minutes while the coffee’s brewing, and then going down to my office and just plowing into it—no Twitter, no internet, no nothing, just me, in the dark, before sunrise, getting right into this book.
It started rough—it took a week or so to get into the rhythm, but pretty soon I was chugging out 400 words a day, then 800 words, then 1,000 words. I just kept doing that, and it was the best—last year was the best experience writing I think I’ve ever had. I almost couldn’t wait to go to bed at night so I could get up in the morning and work on this book I was really enjoying. And for the first time in a long time it was the work itself drawing me back to the chair every day, not the hope of finding a publisher or the hope of anything, just the work itself. And lo and behold, I’ve never done this in my life, but I wrote this complete manuscript in three months. It wasn’t because I was cutting corners or skimming along—it was just consistency, every day. If you write 1,000 words a day, in 30 days you’ll have 30,000 words, and in 60 days you’ll have 60,000 words. Once the steam locomotive is rolling on the tracks, it’s not so hard anymore—it almost gets its own momentum.
BIAHADJ: But getting the steam going is the difficult part.
SD: That’s right, firing up the boiler and getting the wheels moving is hard, but once it’s rolling you just have to keep feeding the furnace. When I would write, I used to push until I couldn’t push anymore and that would be my writing day, and if that was until three in the morning then so be it. Now I very purposefully don’t do that. I set some kind of modest goal—maybe it’s 500 words or 1,000 words, whatever. But many times during the writing of this book there were days when I was really on fire and I felt like I had more to give that day, but I stopped anyway. I used that leftover energy to live my life or prepare for the next day, and then when I woke up I was ready to go, I wasn’t empty. Not only did I still have some in the tank from yesterday, the volume had increased overnight while I slept, so keeping that tank a little bit full instead of running it dry every day and starting with no gas in the morning has been great to me.
BIAHADJ: Keeping up that rhythm and finding the space and consistency to get the words down is so important, I think.
SD: As awful as last year was in so many ways for so many people, for me it was kind of a gift, because I was able to establish a new routine that really worked. About five years ago I changed day jobs and found that I actually enjoyed my new one. It’s a different kind of work, it stimulates my brain in a different way. So suddenly I don’t actually mind my day job, and I’m also getting this good work done on the side—it felt like everything was sort of gelling.
So I finished Device-Free Weekend, it went to David, he had notes, a couple months of revising, and then in October we went out with it, and…there again, the whole demoralizing process of waiting, and then the first rejection comes in and you say, well, you expect rejections, and then the second one, and you start thinking okay, here we go. But once again it’s just a matter of finding that editor that responded, and right before the holidays we sold that book.
BIAHADJ: Nice!
SD: I can’t really give details yet, but my goal was to try to get back on a larger New York house, and right before Christmas right as New York publishing was going to shut down for the year we struck a deal with a really good publisher and went into the holidays feeling great. So right now doing the day job and being a writer feels like not a chore at all.
You can find more about Sean Doolittle and his books at his website or follow him on Twitter.
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